We almost didn't have a paper today

Dear Readers,

As journalists, we’re constantly adapting to new situations. Always searching for the perfect story often lends itself to last minute interviews, new developments and digging around for the latest dirt. As stressful as it can get at times, it’s the adrenaline rush of always being on the go and thrown in to new situations that always keeps us coming back to write the next article handed our way.

We’ve dealt with it all — dead batteries in tape recorders, lost notes, unreturned phone calls and computer crashes at the 11th hour before we send the paper to our publisher. Despite these setbacks, we’ve always pulled together our resources and gotten our paper out to you, no matter what.

On Sunday, however, we faced an issue in our office that even had us stumped — our Internet and our server, the lifeline of our paper, crashed. Not only could we not access the Internet to double check facts, our editors and reporters couldn’t open their stories or layouts on our computers. We couldn’t even print our pages to edit. A single flash drive, passed between dozens of reporters and editors held all of the stories that you’re getting ready to read now.
At best, all we could imagine was that a power surge caused from an electricity outage the night before had fried our router or that our Internet had crashed. We plugged and unplugged wires, tried rebooting and checked circuits but to no avail. We were at a loss for words. No pun intended.

As the hours passed that we still didn’t have a connection, we all become more and more panicked as to how we were going to get the paper published today.
In a final act of desperation we contacted Mike Chinn, a tech guru and a friend of Stephanie Kraus our Senior News Reporter, and pleaded with him to come to our rescue. Not only did he get us back up and running but he found the cause of our mishap — a damaged power cord. As hard as it was to believe that a single cord had been the root of our panic we could finally breather easier knowing that one way or another, this issue would be published. Mike, we owe you.

So, take some time to look through this issue and treasure the fact that it may not have made it to the printing press. As always, let us know what you think at editor@udreview.com

Faithfully yours,
Josh Shannon, Editor in Chief
Maddie Thomas, Executive Editor